By Kirsty Kawano (written for Zenbird in August 2021) For more than one thousand years, Kyoto has held Japan’s biggest festival, the Gion Festival. In a regular year, throughout the month of July, more than one million people crowd into downtown Kyoto City to experience the street stalls, the towering wooden floats adorned with gorgeous …Read More
Author: WiK (Page 9 of 13)
by Lisa Twaronite Sone Sweeping the dust, that used to be my job at Hounji. I also worked as a maid at a nearby hotel, but I liked being outside. So when my shifts there were over, I would walk over to the temple, pick up a broom and sweep for hours. It didn’t pay …Read More
by Ted Taylor A few years back, renowned guitarist Joshua Breakstone came up with the idea of doing some jazz and poetry nights, where local poets could join his band on stage. We’d start in Kyoto, and if it went well, we’d try to expand it to other cities in Japan, and liaise with local …Read More
Review by Rebecca Otowa I wanted to read and review this book for two reasons. First, I was captivated by the very attractive cover illustration by Kawase Hasui. Second, I myself had visited the city of Kanazawa in 2021 – though my visit was short, I did manage to see some of the more important …Read More
by Richard Holmes It’s that time of the year again when people leave their March madness behind them and go nuts over flowers. You know, the ones that flower in all shades of pink all over Japan. There’s even a weather term named after them – the 桜前線 ‘sakura zensen’ or cherry blossom front. People …Read More
by Edward J. Taylor The closer we got to Mt. Hiei’s eastern face, the less I liked the look of the sky. Those carved valleys were holding onto clouds, letting loose precipitation which would eventually precipitate cuts deeper still. Mere minutes off the train, the rain found us, and the cuts most quickly noticeable were …Read More
REVIEW by Rebecca Otowa THE WIDOW, THE PRIEST AND THE OCTOPUS HUNTERBy Amy Chavex (Tuttle 2022) Available on Amazon Amy Chavez has had an unusual life in Japan. Beginning in a teaching position in Okayama, a city between Kobe and Hiroshima, she moved to an island in the nearby Japan Sea known as Shiraishi (White …Read More
Japan Sitting in an office, staring through the long windowsOf the next building’s offices, I see cold sky,I see black mountains flat on it like stencils. Through lower windows in that same slabI see a line of office window river panels,The river brownish blue, and surpassingly calm, Intricately-placidly rippled by, one guesses,A subtle wind, a …Read More
by Stephen Benfey —A rock has a hundred faces, the Japanese gardener said. I thought of asking why not two-hundred, but this was one of Sawamura’s greatest hits, up there with Nature is always right, the latter spoken in his Kyoto-accented English. —Sensei, I said, —all this nice weather and no jobs. What’s up?” —Keeping …Read More
By Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi From New York City, the ink barely dry on a master’s degree in arts administration, I’d come to Tokyo to try my luck as an arts writer. My self-assigned beat became the top floor art galleries of Tokyo department stores, purveyors of some of the finest nihonga paintings in the nation. …Read More
Kyoto Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
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